School's Out: Hyperlearning, the New Technology, and the End of Education

Are school systems, classrooms and teachers obsolete? No less so than the horse was with the coming of the automobile age, argues Perelman, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute in Washington, D.C., in this stimulating brief for technology-based hyperlearning. He makes many apt criticisms of current schooling, charging, for example, that the current mode of passive learning is defective and that our education system is monolithic and socialistic (American academia is about 90% owned, operated and/or financed by government). He supports not only parental choice of schools, but also students' microchoice from a floating technology menu. On the debit side, techno-optimist Perelman is too eager to lump together all styles and types of learning and to ignore the role of gifted teachers. In his seemingly corporation-friendly way, he praises the innovative entrepreneurial leadership demonstrated by Chris Whittle with his controversial Edison Project, a private school system Perelman believes is dedicated to profitability as a necessary criterion of success. (Oct.)